Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

Ethical existence [is] the highest manifestation of spirituality.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

As long as the decent people refuse to believe that morality must manifest itself in every sphere of human activity, including the political, they will not meet the challenge of Marxism.

I have yet to meet a man as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Our probity is not less at the mercy of fortune than our property.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

I believe that God is the source of all the universal, timeless principles. And to Him, I give all the credit and the glory. However, to a person who is not religious, I believe they can live to the highest level of their conscience and develop spiritual intelligence that surpasses most people, including many religious people, who profess but do not practice.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.

Ye must leave righteous ways behind, not to speak of unrighteous ways.

All the gold upon the earth and all the gold beneath it, does not compensate for lack of virtue.

It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

There is too much animal courage in society and not sufficient moral courage.